Interact 2008 – Day 1 | David DeWinter

The first day of Interact 2008 was a superb opening to the conference. The day started with a keynote from Gurdeep Singh Pall, who is the "corporate vice president in the Unified Communications Group at Microsoft Corp. He is responsible for vision, product strategy and R&D for Microsoft’s Unified Communications including voice over Internet protocol (VoIP)."¹ From there we had the opportunity to attend "breakout sessions," seminars led by Microsoft employees or MVPs on abstruse topics for OCS, Office Communicator (OC), and Exchange, or participate in hands-on labs—exercises also related to OCS, OC, and Exchange, aimed at developers and IT professionals.

Gurdeep’s keynote stressed three points. The first was the future of software communications. Telephony is an industry that has been dominated by hardware, and the evolution of communication systems has traditionally coincided with the evolution of phones. However, what about other means of communication such as email and IM? It is becoming apparent that software has a place in the communication industry; some would even argue that it plays a major role. By building a platform for software developers to build off in the unified communications area, Microsoft’s UC solution brings the focus away from the presence of a machine (such as a phone or a laptop) to the presence of a human being.

Gurdeep went on to explain his own version of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (called Gurdeep’s Hierarchy of Needs) which addresses the needs of telecom managers. The four lower levels of the pyramid were needs analogous to Maslow’s deficiency needs. If you have them, you don’t think about them; for example, you don’t go around the office exclaiming that you have email—similarly, you don’t think about physiological needs if you have met them. The point was that once the deficiency needs are met, you can self-actualize, which encourages spontaneity and creativity for innovating solutions to business problems.

Finally, Gurdeep discussed the perspective that Microsoft brings to the UC table—moving IT into the "business zone" using three core concepts:

Interoperate (1 + 1 = 2)

Previously, the model for UC has been vertically integrated communications, where vendors offer their own stack of technologies to provide a comprehensive telephony solution. Microsoft wants to turn that model on its side by identifying various layers of telephony (hardware, software, devices, etc.) for which multiple vendors can offer a number of different solutions. Microsoft knows it can make advances by providing a software platform which can interoperate with existing vendors’ hardware and devices. This model will allow for industry- and enterprise-specific development and innovation—in essence, self-actualization.

Integrate (1 + 1 = 3)

Whereas interoperability is about making sure your platform is compatible with other platform, integration is about achieving synergy across disparate systems in an architecture. At this point, Gurdeep let Albert Kooiman and members of Clarity Consulting to demonstrate how they developed a pilot project which integrated their CRM application with the presence and communication features within Office Communicator and OCS. (This sort of integration is also what we are very attracted to for our own telephony solution.)

Impact

Sometimes it’s about more than just ROI. (And I’m sure some of you will disagree.) Gurdeep played a video about children at St. Luke’s Hospital who are getting a second chance at school and education through Microsoft RoundTable. There is an abridged article about the story here.

The rest of the day was filled with a variety of sessions on OCS, OC, Exchange, and various other topics. Here are the choices I made:

Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 Internals and Troubleshooting (Nikhil Bobde, Sam Bedekar)

Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 offers the rich client experience and brings together all exciting features that are part of the our [sic] UC offering. Understand the internals of how OC 2007 is built and the various technologies behind it. This session would cover how the client ties together the information from a variety of servers (OCS, MCUs, Edge servers, mediation server, exchange, AD and a host of other web services) to built [sic] the compelling UC scenarios. The session will cover deployment and setup of Office communicator clients and also the integration of OC into other office clients and SPS. We will walk through how to troubleshoot the most common errors/failures seen by the end user in OC UX and quickly pin point the source of failure. The session would help the attendees to gain some valuable insight into the overall client architecture.

Setup and Configuration Automation for Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 (Thomas Theiner)

The planning, preparation and rollout of a system like Office Communications Server with its many components is a challenging project. Learn about the different parts and tools you can use to make this easier.

Advanced Validation and Troubleshooting for OCS 2007 (Byron Spurlock, Tom Laciano)

OCS 2007 troubleshooting is to provide the person(s) involved in deploying OCS an in depth insight to the tools that are available and articulate when, where, and how to use them. Leveraging the right tools and knowing what to look for can expedite troubleshooting immensely. We will take a deep dive into logs, validation tools, and diagnostic reports to view the environment from a core level. The following are just a few of areas that we will take a look at in the session: Federation issues, external users not able to connect to the internal environment, validation of the correct ports needed for remote and internal access for Voice, Video, Web Conferencing, and IM functions.

My choices may seem a bit strange knowing that I’m more of a developer than a network administrator, but I have to say that being out of my comfort zone was a great learning experience about the OCS and OC infrastructures. The troubleshooting sessions were the most helpful for me because the speakers discussed the exact steps to take when diagnosing problems both in Office Communicator and in OCS itself. Being able to recognize the problems that come up in this environment as well as knowing how to handle them is invaluable from the developer’s point-of-view, partly because the business side does not usually see the difference between the front-end components like the IVR and CRM application and the back-end servers which comprise the OCS infrastructure.

The session on the automated configuration of OCS was not as useful to me; it is interesting to know how to do it, but it’s probably not a scenario I will come up against soon.

For the closing event, Microsoft planned a night of beachside entertainment at the San Diego Wave House. I had a great time, even though I did not try to surf. (Mark did though!) It was the first time I’d been to the beach in a ong time, too. Here are some shots from the event.